This chapter studies how the ocean became a realm of human rights aspiration. It illuminates the emergence of an oceanic idea of human rights as an antislavery work, the invention of African Americans who had been held as slaves as well as of freeborn abolitionists. In antislavery thought, the ocean constituted not a space for traversing, creating wealth, or making war – of commerce and of empire – but a realm of natural human liberty. The chapter traces the origins of this idea to a slave rebellion aboard an American ship sailing on the Atlantic ocean in 1841– a coastwise slave trade voyage– and the conflict of laws caused by the rebellion. Out of this conflict, the chapter argues, emerged emancipatory doctrine that contributed to a burgeoning antislavery invocation of human rights while transforming a conception of the free sea that was centuries old.

This chapter considers debates about the ‘common heritage of mankind’ during the 1973–82 UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. Postwar jurisdictional claims over ever-larger portions of the world’s oceans raised the possibility of an unregulated and destabilizing scramble for maritime rights, resources, and territories, culminating in what was often described as the enclosure of the oceanic commons. It also lent urgency to developing countries’ calls for a new law of the sea treaty that would reflect their own rights claims. The result was a series of fractious negotiations spanning nine years, at the centre of which was the question of how the deep seabed and its resources would be managed. Third World states sought an international organization authorized to oversee the deep seabed’s exploration and exploitation, coordinating the global distribution of resulting benefits. Industrialized states proposed a licensing system in which states and corporations would be granted concessions to mine in the international zone. Ultimately, ‘common heritage’ rhetoric proved central to the resulting treaty, but the ‘parallel’ system of seabed mining it legalized had the effect of ensuring that the ocean floor’s resources would be controlled largely by those with financial wealth and technological means.

This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its absence. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which abolished privateering, helped normalizing the idea of a modern state with a monopoly on legitimate violence and the oceans as a global common under the control of benign hegemons. Ambiguities between private and public violence at sea were forgotten, as was the extensive ‘peripheral’ agency, obvious in how privateering was used time and again to oppose the leading powers of the day.

This book addresses multiple perspectives on challenges and solutions to the environmental rule of law for oceans. Despite the variety of perspectives, topics and geographical areas covered, several cross-cutting challenges appear. These include the need for both flexibility and generality, as well as both specificity and fit-for-purpose law; a lack of clarity in definitions, provisions and laws; the urgent need for enhanced coordination and cooperation; and the need to improve implementation, compliance and enforcement. This closing chapter presents solutions in the context of (1) tackling existing and new pressures on the marine environment, (2) ensuring a proper balance between exploitation and protection of oceans and seas, (3) improving implementation, compliance and enforcement and (4) strengthening the rule of law in regional seas and oceans.

Chapter 3 looks at our emerging resources crisis and its solutions.

Chapter 7 argues that, if we are to halt humankind’s unrelenting exploitation of marine sources and sinks, we need to change our economic approach to oceans and coasts. It begins with addressing the underpricing of marine capital and their services and the underfunding of ocean and coastal conservation. Addressing these challenges must also be the focus of global collective action. The savings and revenues generated can also be allocated to support global funds and investments in marine capital and protection. However, more comprehensive cooperation between the international community, national governments and the private sector is required to develop global policies to protect vulnerable coastal populations, disappearing marine habitats, such as coral reefs and mangroves, and the deep sea.

If world literature is conceived as a network of transregional, multi-local and transnational nodes stretching back to antiquity, oceanic worlds can be seen to offer a generative frame for literary history. The world’s oceans gird the shores of cities, nations, islands and continents. They generate contact zones that are multilingual, demographically mixed, economically varied and culturally hybrid. Further, much like world literature, the historicity of the oceans can scarcely be contained within the temporality of transatlantic capitalism from the eighteenth century to the present. This chapter explores literary works across several oceanic zones and offers oceanic comparativism as a rich cartographic frame for world literature.

This chapter considers what happens to the cartography of ‘world literature’ in times of mass migration and indefinite detention. It focuses on contemporary literature by and about refugees and asylum seekers, using the distinction between emic (written from the perspective of the subject) and etic (written from the perspective of the observer) narratives. It turns to representations of refugees in ‘hospitable’ narratives, such as graphic narrative and contemporary novels, and questions the ethics of recognition in humanitarian storytelling. In a case study of Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical novel No Friend But the Mountains, a paperless text ‘thumbed’ by a Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker on a smartphone in Farsi at the remote detention centre on Manus Island, PNG, and translated by a transnational authorial assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, it considers how new technologies now transform the possibilities for a literature from the camps in the borderlands where refugees and asylum seekers are detained.

Explains how man-made ‘pollution’ – often seen as a local problem – has become a virtual river flowing round the entire planet. Describes contamination of oceans, remote regions, air in homes and cities, effect of plastics, impacts on wildlife. Defines six modes of chemical transport. Pollution is now universal, affecting all people and most of life on Earth

Massive accumulation of marine litter is internationally recognized as one of the most pressing environmental concerns of our time. The chapter shows that there is a process underway towards recognition of marine litter, and marine plastic pollution in particular, as a common concern of humankind. It identifies existing general obligations in the subject area, which largely correlate with the pillars of the doctrine as discussed in this book. The chapter explores the potentials of the doctrine of common concern to further reinforce global efforts to mitigate marine plastic pollution. It argues that the recognition of marine plastic pollution as a common concern of humankind urges states to cooperate more closely and calls for the establishment of a specific legal framework on marine plastics, including from land-based pollution sources. In a legal binding instrument, standards can be set regarding national implementation.

The chapter covers the intensive diplomacy related to whaling, one of the central campaigns the League was leading. As technological developments in the field of whaling rapidly increased, scientists became concerned that whales were about to become extinct. The League became the center for a fierce battle between whaling powers (who were reluctant to accept any external intervention in “their” profitable industries) and scientific associations and “neutral” voices (who urged the League to prevent a version of the tragedy of the commons on the high seas).

This chapter compares the negotiations and proposals for the first international whaling conventions, in order to control the boom in whaling expeditions. These had begun to travel farther and farther in the oceans, bringing the species to the brink of historical disaster.

The story of interwar whaling follows on the consideration of maritime pollution (covered in Chapter I). As both of these case studies entangled in the webs of waves, seas, and international law, it seems as they should follow each other, as they depict a certain sense of water security. Based on both chapters together, one can interpret the ways in which the League and other participants saw the sea as a legal world.